Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 176 - Making Monsters Scarier

Episode Date: May 21, 2023

There are a few common tips and tricks that DMs can use to make monsters scarier or merely seem that they are.  In this episode I discuss ways that you can get rid of that same-old-same-old feeling with your monsters and keep your players on their toes.   #dnd #Pathfinder #opendnd #dungeonsanddragons #dmtips

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. I think it is a handy skill for we GMs to develop, though, because making monsters tougher and throwing a little variety in the monsters that the players may have seen before can only make your game better. Thank you for listening to the Taking20 Podcast, episode 176, all about making monsters scarier. I want to thank this week's sponsor, Soap. Did you know that certain types of soaps can repulse men? They're called deter-gents.

Okay, look, I'm up to pun number 350 now, and they're not all going to be gems, so please forgive me for that one. If you like this podcast, please consider telling a friend about it. I realize that I podcast about a very niche topic, and I'll never have millions of listeners, but I would love to see it reach a wider audience. I think tabletop RPGs are an amazing hobby, and I would love to be the one to help introduce people to it. So, if you would be so kind, please help me spread the word about this little podcast. I've had an unexpected surge of listeners from Germany, like a major

surge over the last few weeks. So much so that they've actually outpaced my US numbers a couple of times. So to my listeners there, Guten Morgen, Guten Tag, Guten Abend, whenever you happen to be listening, thank you so much for downloading and I hope you enjoy the episode. Because of my new listeners, though, I have to tell a brief story. I've been to Germany twice in my life, once to Berlin for a cybersecurity conference, and once for my company at the time, who had a European IT retreat to a small bed and breakfast near Fischbach, south of Frankfurt, where I was invited to talk about global network and cybersecurity projects. The why doesn't matter. Let me tell you what does matter. I could not live in Germany. I'd be 150 kilograms in the blink of an eye. The food there is so good.

I got introduced to this German white asparagus called spargel, and that stuff is like vegetable crack. It's like buttery, softer version of asparagus we get here in the States. I went during Spargel Zeit, which was mid-April many, many years ago, and I remember having a couple of dinners that were like five courses and three hours long. I could have died of happiness right then. On top of that, the people were so nice. Okay, I'm sorry for the old man rambling story, but the little town close to the small bed and breakfast, they were having a celebration where the young men of the town would go into the forest, cut down this enormous tree, carry it back to town, prepare it, and then set it into the ground to be the centerpiece for the celebration.

A couple of the locals told me the story and it was an opportunity for the young men to prove their manliness for the single ladies in attendance. I watched some of the work being done and I'll just say I was very glad to be an old married man by this time. That looked like work. Anyway, thank you for humoring me and thank you to the good people of Germany who are listening there. I can't wait to make another trip there someday. We all have monsters that we know and love and tend to use a lot. When I'm DMing, I love dropping an ogre in against a low-level party, or gelatinous cube. At higher levels, I tend to love vampires of all types, and medusae, and rune giants, and pathfinder.

Just so much fun, especially with knowledgeable players. Out of the distant cave steps what appears to be at first a beautiful woman, but something isn't right. Her hair appears to be moving on its own, and suddenly it dawns on you that the statues you saw weren't the work of a master carver, and your blood turns to ice as you look down at your feet. Roll for initiative.

Some monsters are more common at your table than others. You might love Kuotoa, but not like Merfle. If so, then your players that are with you over a long time will come to know Kuotoa's stat block, and since they know them very well, familiarity can breed contempt. Yeah, yeah. AC 13, about 18 to 20 hit points, higher strength, lower charisma, sticky shield, etc, etc, etc. They know how Kuo-Toa fight, like the back of their hands, because they fought them a lot and may lose interest in the fight because it's same old, same old. That's why, my wonderful DMs and GMs out there, I implore you, change up your stat blocks a bit. Even if you don't make them tougher, give monsters spears instead of axes

or bows instead of slings or magic missile instead of burning hands. Variety is the spice of life. Don't just stick to the boring vanilla creatures. Mix it up a bit. Break out the handcuffs and the nurtures outfit every now and then. I have been told that that was inappropriate for the podcast and that I should apologize.

I told my wife I'd apologize if she came out wearing a dirndl because there is no way that she would, uh, she would ever, uh, wow. To my listeners, I apologize profusely for the racy undertones of my previous joke, and I will be right back. Whew, sorry. Where were we? Oh, a word of caution before we begin. If you're not comfortable and familiar with changing monsters, then I would recommend keeping your first tweaks and changes small for now until you know what you're doing. Have your party fight a mix of monsters, some default and maybe some with your minor tweaks included, so you can see how your tweaks would affect gameplay. These little experiments that you can do as you're learning

means less of a chance of a disaster TPK just because you tweak too hard. I think it is a handy skill for Wii GMs to develop though, because making monsters tougher and throwing a little variety in the monsters that the players may have seen before can only make your game better. If you do want to make changes, then making changes to monsters is all about subverting expectations and changing details to be different than what the players maybe have seen before. Changing weapons and armor, making them better swimmers, changing the creature type, and we're going to get to all of this in a little bit. In my experience, unannounced and unexpected monster modifications work best when you have experienced players at your table.

Oh, it's a zombie brute? Yeah, I've fought these before. They have about 70 hit points and an AC of 15. You may have asked your players not to metagame, but sometimes the players just can't help it. Throughout their gaming life, their characters, plural, have fought a hundred zombie brutes. Punch you with a fist, about a plus 11 to a hit, and does about 12 points of damage per hit. Yeah, yeah, seen them before. Now imagine their surprise when you say that the brute takes a deep breath and sends out a devastating sonic wave like the cry of destruction cleric ability. You can hear it around your table now, but wait, what? They can't do that. That's illegal. It's not in the stat block. Yeah, well, this one can. Make me a basic fortitude save for

half damage, please. The player may be a little shell-shocked, but they just learned that they're not in your dad's Pathfinder 2 e-game. I love the looks between veteran players around the table when they realize that a lot of their pre-existing knowledge that they brought to the table about all these different monsters their characters have fought over the course of years and years of campaigning matters precisely zero at this table. They will look around in shock and maybe a little fear. They don't have all the answers like they thought they did. They aren't going to be able to coast on their player knowledge. It's like they broke into the professor's office, stole the test, memorized it,

only to have a different test hit their desk on testing day. Oh, so delicious to be on either side of this, by the way. I love it when I get surprised by a monster's abilities because the GM has customized it. It does what? I have to make what kind of save? Oh, what do you mean an attack of opportunity? This is new. That creature doesn't have... Ooh, clever. Let's do this. As an aside, do you know where some of your best ideas for custom creatures can come from? Children and nightmares. I'm sure there's a joke here about children being nightmares or nightmares springing from ourselves like there are children, but I'm not peeling the layers off of either one of those onions. Just take it at

face value. Children come up with some mind-blowing ideas for monsters. I remember reading a post a long time ago about a DM's kid coming up with a spider dragon. I like it. Sounds neat, just from the name of it. Then they said the dragon had eight legs. Love it. Spun webs. Interesting. Could fly. Alright. And its breath weapon was a swarm of spiders, and I'm immediately starting to scribble down stats. Oh dear god. Stuff of nightmares. My son once described a monster that was an undead warrior that had been killed by axes thrown at it.

It could pull out an axe from its own body and throw it, only to have it reappear in its body after the attack. Plus, he said it could scream in a radius to scare people, and guess what one of my parties fought later that night? My son was eight when he came up with the idea. Eight! And he came up with a better idea for a custom monster than I probably ever have. Another good source for monsters, by the way, your own nightmares. If you're someone who never has monsters in your dreams,

then this will be bad advice, but whenever I have ideas for RPGs pop up in my dreams, whether it's jokes, puns, monsters, adventure ideas, or whatever, I write them down immediately when I wake up. You never know when you'll need a combination ant-death knight who's condemned to protect the woods from trespassers, stomping through clearings with armor made of hardened bark

and a club from a fallen hardwood tree. Or the fungal creature that keeps most of its bulk below the ground but forms the visible shape of a humanoid laying on its side on the forest floor. Maybe it makes a crying sound like the witch from Left 4 Dead. The party's wandering through the forest, and they hear someone crying in the gloomy dusk. They go to investigate, and suddenly they're fighting a gargantuan moss creature that can, I don't know, infect you with fungus that incubates for a few days

and starts communicating with a central fungus patch. The character starts hearing voices and then receiving urges to do things contrary to their character, and next thing you know, they have an adventure to go kill the spore node or get hundreds of miles away from it to quiet the fungal infection raging throughout their body. Yeah, chew on that one for a while. I'm pretty sure if I ever decide to go see a psychiatrist and talk about some of my nightmares and some of my different foibles, they'll make enough money off of me to put a kid or two through college. That being said, does making changes to monsters like this require extra work on the DM's part?

Yes, that's the bad news. But over time, you do what I do. I've developed a table of some fun spells and effects that I can attach to a monster at will to make it tougher, scarier, maybe sow a little doubt in the player's minds. And that doubt can give rise to an uncertainty whether they're actually up to the challenge of this new Sonic zombie or not. But suppose you do want to make some changes. The easiest thing to change are the numbers in the stat block to make them tougher or scarier. Give them more hit points, higher armor class, higher attack bonus.

Tinker with the numbers a little bit to make them a little bigger. But a word of caution. RPGs tend to be balanced around certain values. And here's where I'm going to heap praise on Paizo for the creature tables they include in the 2e game mastery guide on pages 56 through 61. On those pages, you can find approximate ability modifiers, skill modifiers, items, armor class, and other values broken down by creature level. These are averages, and you can change the values up and down as needed depending on your party, but these give you a, I'll call it a safe zone that you can play in, and it reduces the

chance for a game-breaking change where the party is TPK'd by your home-brewed zombie serpent folk. If you don't have a similar table in your game, my rule of thumb for hit points is usually 10% or so. Taking a 22 hit point creature and giving him 24 or 25 hit points, you're not going to dramatically affect the toughness of the creature. It might survive one more hit and get one last good chomp or stab before it shuffles off its mortal coil. The drama with 10% of hit points? Rare. 15%? Starts getting a little borderline, and I'd say of a 20% swing for a really tough example of a creature. That 218 hit point CR 10 creature isn't much different at 238 hit points, but the tweak up to 249 makes that monster live longer, and going up to 260 is probably going to

result in a very tough fight, much longer than the default creature would be. 5e, meanwhile, lives and dies on a concept known as bounded accuracy, which limits the numeric bonuses to D20 rolls, and you generally need to stay fairly close to traditional numbers to keep the game balanced. Each game has a slightly different mechanic for balancing. Starfinder, for example, has multiple ACs that you can tweak to make it easier or harder. Mork Borg has morale, armor, etc. that you can tweak. And as I mentioned, this is a balancing act. It's half art and half science. That doesn't mean you couldn't jack up the hit points to 260 on your 5e CR 10 creature,

but I might drop its attack bonus from 7 maybe to 6 or maybe even 5 to offset that one attribute being so much higher than normal. But I'm not the homebrew monster police. Want to make a CR2 creature with 191 hit points and three attacks at plus seven? Go with the gods, my friend. Because your second level PCs almost certainly will go to theirs when they fight it. Pathfinder 2e has a built-in mechanic also to scale monster stats up or down called elite or weak, respectively. An elite version of a creature is a tougher version for whatever reason. It's more experienced. It's survived in the brood longer. It's subsisted on a diet of protein shakes and hate.

Whatever the reason, they're just bigger and badder. In 2e, elite creatures have attack modifiers, armor class, DCs, saving throws, perception and skill modifiers, armor class, DCs, saving throws, perception, and skill modifiers increased by two. The damage of its strikes and other offensive abilities go up by two, unless it's a so many times per day ability, and then it goes up by four. And then you increase the hit points based on the starting level, between 10 and 30 hit points. Weak version would be the opposite. All of this is detailed, by the way. Pathfinder Bestiary on page 6. The math is simple, and most DMs can do it on the fly once you get familiar with the rules.

So, if you're looking to make monsters tougher, take existing monsters, tweak the numbers. Or, if you're up for more of a challenge, another thing that you can do is give them more abilities, or abilities that are useful in a wider set of circumstances. For example, let's take the Pathfinder 2e monster, the Ghost of a Commoner. It's a CR4 creature, and if you look up the stats on Archives of Nethis, which, by the way, to let everybody know who has never played Pathfinder 2e, that's not a pirate site. Paizo supports the site, so you don't have to feel dirty like you're getting content for free or pirating by going to Archives of Nethis. Nope, completely legit, all the rules and a lot of the monster stats are there. But if you look up the common or ghost stats there,

the armor class is on the low end at 20, and the hit points are half of some of its peers, only 30. However, it has undead immunities, it's incorporeal, and that Frightful Moan ability makes up for it by potentially giving everyone on the battlefield the Frighten 2 or 3 condition, which is a penalty to damn near every check that you can make. How can we tweak this? Suppose you have a player who's playing a character that is deaf. That would make that character completely immune to the Frightfulful moan since that ability has the auditory trait meaning you have to be able to hear it. You could tweak this ability so that when the ghost moans and sees it has no effect on a creature, it has a secondary

frightening effect that is visual only. That doesn't scale the monster up too much and could still be fun around the table. Think the ghosts that the Ghostbusters encounter in the library at the beginning of that movie from the 80s. One other thing that you could tweak is to give more monsters attacks of opportunity. This is dangerous because by default, not many creatures in Pathfinder 2e have AOOs or attacks of opportunity, and the game's balanced around that, but maybe even non-soldier hobgoblins could get it

because they're trained to take advantage of openings and weaknesses from birth. Also in Pathfinder 2e, you can give creatures special abilities from monsters of a comparable level. That level 4 commoner ghost, imagine you gave it the ability to command zombies like a level 4 zombie lord. Come up with an in-game reason why this particular ghost has zombie thralls and go to town. Or maybe it has divine innate spells like an bar guest or can slink in the shadows like a... Well, a shadow. That being said, if you do give the monster an ability from a comparable level monster, it will make this monster a bit tougher and it might raise the level or challenge rating a bit. So if you want to keep the monster at a comparable

strength, you'll probably need to weaken the monster somewhere else. Attack rating, weaken other abilities, lower armor class, lower hit points, etc. There's a reason why PC wizards, who can do massive amounts of damage in a radius per round have fewer hit points than a paladin who is built to do martial damage to a single combatant. I need to hit the gas pedal, by the way, because I have a lot more to get to, and I am way into this episode. Another thing you can do to make monsters tougher or scarier

is to change their creature type. Pathfinder 2e is a creature called a filth fire. It's basically a rolling, flying, smoky cloud of burning trash. It's an elemental, but with a fire trait. Now, what if that creature had the acid trait instead, and the smoke caused acid damage? Now that wizard who has that ring of fire resistance and knows all about filth fires, they're in real danger of having their face melt off. Again, this type of change is extremely effective against veteran players who think they've seen it

all and done it all. Change the creature type, watch the color drain out of their faces when they realize that they don't know exactly what this is. One thing that makes monsters tougher is to give them additional resistances or immunities that the players don't expect. tougher is to give them additional resistances or immunities that the players don't expect. This particular rhino has tougher hide, so it gains resistance against bludgeoning and slashing four. It's not a huge change, but it'll make it tougher to kill. That hide also, by the way, could be very valuable. Maybe masterwork if someone with a survival skill can bring large sections of it back to an armorsmith. Higher risk, after all, should mean higher reward.

You can make a monster tougher by giving them more or special actions. 5e has a wonderful mechanic that I love of legendary and lair actions, which give monsters additional abilities depending on their strength and where you find them. But as I've said, steal ideas wherever you find them. Why couldn't your Pathfinder 2e adult blue dragon in its desert cave lair have some special actions and attacks that it could only do there? Maybe it could create a sinkhole or whirlpool or rain sand down blinding the party and it's immune to these effects. You can make monsters tougher also by giving them class levels. Common stat block hobgoblins sure are a fun fight, but those same hobgoblins where say two have levels of fighter, one's a cleric, and one's a sorcerer? Nut up baby because shit

just got real. I mentioned at the start of this episode that you can give monsters better equipment. For particularly tough fights like lieutenants and boss fights, why not give the monster magic items? One of the things I've never understood is when an adventure is written where the party has been fighting intelligent humanoids, and then as they're looting the room, there are magic weapons stored in a crate, or there's a set of magic armor laying in the corner or consumables like healing potions that aren't part of the monster stat block and aren't available for the monster to use in a fight. Even if the bandit has no access to detect magic for some reason, they'll know that the shiny armor that is stuck in the corner

seems to work better than the cheap stuff they bought in town at the Gnome Depot. I've talked a lot about tinkering with stat block and equipment, but that's not the only thing you can do to make monsters scarier for the players. You could have the monsters fight smarter and use good tactics. There's nothing wrong with what I call a stand and bang fight, where each side just closes to the appropriate range, slogs it out toe to toe. Unintelligent creatures, hungry animals, and desperate, hungry humanoids are likely to take this tact. However, one of the foundational tenets of

encounters that I try to design is that the creatures generally want to be alive at the end of it. And even creatures with an animal level of intelligence can do some kind of rudimentary risk-reward evaluation of an encounter. Most monsters who are attacking because they're hungry,

they're looking for a target that's lower effort and it's not going to fight back. If possible, they'll position themselves where they have the greatest chance for success. Creatures with dark vision tend to hide in the darkest of places. Creatures with camouflage will hide in areas where they can blend in. They will use tactics where it's smart. This is doubly true, by the way, for intelligent creatures and humanoids. Kobolds are small and light and will make their warrens with low ceilings and drop-away traps if someone heavy steps on them. Humans tend to hunt in packs and will smartly keep their squishier distance killers

like ranged combatants and spellcasters behind the beefier ones. Plus, they'll probably keep a healer in reserve to keep their allies in the fight. They may even attack in waves to take down the tougher PCs through erosion of the PC's resources. Which dovetails nicely into another way to make monsters scarier, give them support. Spellcasters in support that can aid a fight from afar are a great way to make encounters and monsters scarier. The healing cleric that's doing two action heals from way distant from the battlefield. The sorcerer that can grease up half the battlefield. The ranger with so many attacks per round that can drop arrow after arrow into enemy combatants from high branches of a tree. Support for creature

fighters when used intelligently will make the creature scarier and the combat much more dangerous. But what about unintelligent monsters, Jeremy? Should the Ankylosaurus have cleric class levels? At first blush, I would say no, but wouldn't that be hilarious? Big dinosaur presents its tail to the party or hit with a second level harm spell. Outside of a land of the lost type adventure, I probably wouldn't do that. But what I did mean is that sometimes, for example, monsters do have support because monsters can fight together. Monsters can sometimes form symbiotic relationships. Imagine there's a swarm of somewhat intelligent carnivorous birds who can't pierce a T-Rex's hide, but they will happily feast on the remains of whatever the big dinosaur kills.

Whenever the T-Rex explodes from the bush to attack the party on land, the birds take to the sky and envelop the party in a cloud of stabbing, piercing beaks. Now the party has to deal with two different threats simultaneously. Some creatures can happily coexist with others because of immunities. Pathfinder 2e has the sulfur zombie, which has the fire trait and is completely immune to fire damage. What if some fire elementals are in an oppressively hot area, which they enjoy, and that area is infused with necromantic energy of some sort. Anyone who dies there rises again as a sulfur zombie, which the elementals use to help

defend their magma spring. We've talked about tinkering with stat blocks, giving the monsters equipment and class levels, and giving monsters unexpected resistances and support. DMs, my last tip for this episode, and one of the easiest ways to make monsters tougher is on your shoulders alone. It's all about how you describe the monsters and their reactions. If you want your monsters to seem scarier, you have to describe them as scarier, the way they look, act, and react. There's nothing wrong with saying, a T-Rex emerges from the foliage roll initiative. Combat will start and it'll be fine.

But what if you said something like this? The T-Rex emerges from the brush, running at full speed with a roar that could be heard for miles. Its skin is covered in hardened scales and yellow eyes burn with a fierce intelligence. Both result in combat, but the second certainly sounds scarier and promises a more exciting fight. Hitting a monster with damage resistance is even better when it completely resists the spell. Those should be the times when you can really play up the danger of the moment.

Imagine you're playing Pathfinder 2e, that T-Rex fight that I mentioned earlier. It critically succeeds a save against the wizard's fireball. Add a touch of narration to the fight to drive home the threat. It didn't critically succeed because of some ineptness on the party wizard. No, no, no. It deftly sidestepped the explosion, barely touched it, had no effect. It roars and charges the nearest party member. Scary fight, right?

I didn't change a damn thing mechanically. It was all about how the action and reaction were described. Done well, it can result in the instant of fear in that player's mind. That oh shit second where they wonder if the character is going to survive the fight. For inspiration, by the way, I hope you've seen Age of Ultron. If you have, there is a great fight scene between Iron Man and Hulk that actually levels an entire building. There are so many great moments in that fight that I adore, but one of my favorites is when Tony Stark is absolutely pummeling Hulk in the face

and using some of his best technology against the big green hero. Hulk counters it, looks up at Tony, spits out a tooth, and grins. I think all of us were feeling the exact same thing when it briefly shows Tony's look of shock and fear. Use whatever looking up and grinning while spitting out a tooth would be narratively in that moment. The ranger shoots Strahd with an arrow that can't overcome the Baron's damage resistance He pulls out the arrow, snaps it, and grins You're going to have to do much better than that The creature bursts through your two-inch wall of ice like it's not even there

The ghost smiles as your weapon passes harmlessly through it Or Thanos All of that for a drop of blood. Combat against the same creatures over and over again can become rote, boring, been there, done that affairs, if we DMs fall into the trap of just rolling the same creatures out over and over and over again. Mix things up by having different creatures, vary the creatures that you do use by changing their stat blocks, equipment, resistances, give them class levels,

and maybe even different types of creatures and traits. Use your narrative skills to make combat sound scarier even if you don't change a single number on the page, and I bet you and your players would have fun doing it. Do you have a topic you'd like to see me cover? If so, send me that topic on social media or via email to feedback at taking20podcast.com. Also, if you enjoy the podcast, please consider donating at ko-fi.com slash taking20podcast. Tune in next week when I'm going to do another instance of what I'm calling the Back to Basics series, a formula for success for DMs when they're

writing or assembling campaigns. Before I go, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Soap. I used to be completely addicted to soap, but the good news is I'm now clean. This has been episode 176, all about making monsters scarier. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking 20 Podcast is a Publishing Cube Media Production. Copyright 2023. References to game system content are copyrighted by their respective publishers.